A country house somewhere in Tuscany, in the last year of the 20th century. Tristano, who has fought for the freedom of his country under that name, taken from a character in Leopardi, calls to his bedside a writer who was once inspired by him to write a novel. But is it possible to inscribe in the frame of a story the ambiguous geometry of life, with contradictions, doubts, omissions, unfulfilled desires, false or imagined memories? What is heroism? What is cowardice? Treachery? During his agony, Tristano reconstructs an unfathomable past and sketches a fresco of almost sixty years of Italian history, with its tragedies and its simulations, until the emergence of the last tyrannical avatar, that of television stupidity.